Donner-style health care

By Garrison Keillor
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Published: March 20, 2017

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Garrison Keillor

Last fall when he was winning hearts and minds in the Midwest, Mr. Red Cap promised to remove the curse of Obamacare from the nation and replace it with something beautiful that would cover everybody. Now that Trumpcare is out for previews, he says he is in a “beautiful negotiation” and will wind up with a “beautiful picture,” but it’s no longer about everybody. And the picture seems more like a watercolor than a photo.

What he now is emphasizing is how much money the new plan will save. Some $337 billion over 10 years, simply by eliminating 24 million people from the program. Beautiful!

It would appear that the Republicans believe the Right to Life ends 15 minutes after birth.

When it comes to saving money on health care, it is so true that you can save a bundle by eliminating the sick. They’re tiresome, always complaining, they smell bad, and they’re ruining it for the rest of us. Put the seriously ill out of their misery, get them to die 10 days earlier than they normally would, you can run the system at a profit. Simple as that.

Shooting them won’t work — the media is bound to report it and even though it is FAKE FAKE FAKE FAKE NEWS, some faint-hearted limp-wristed congressmen are going to hold hearings about it and bring in weepy relatives to talk about how wonderful Gramps was until the death squad came. Suffocation, though, is quiet, clean, easy, efficient. Plug their noses, stuff a rag in them, shoot them up with powerful sedatives, and they go beddy-bye, no muss, no fuss. Goodbye, life support, hello Jesus.

Poor people are another part of the problem: they scarf up potato chips and cheeseburgers and never go to the gym and so — Duh — they get sick. Whatever happened to personal responsibility? It’s a basic Republican principle. People who make bad choices shouldn’t expect assistance: it’s Darwinism in action — live with it. If you ever smoked, drank alcohol, used recreational drugs, had unsafe sex, overate, or failed to exercise, don’t expect the rest of us to pay for your mistakes, you loser. Suck it up, find yourself a sunny corner to sit in, and wait for the whisper of angel wings. If you want to avoid prolonged suffering, eat some toilet bowl cleanser.

These are honest men who are disassembling Obamacare and they know full well that if you take people off health insurance, people will die as a result. So we should be honest about who we are executing. We could say that the poor will be the first to go, just as they were on the Titanic, but which of the poor? The undeserving? Okay, but that requires a bureaucracy to gather data and make a determination and adjudicate appeals for mercy. We need a standard.

Let’s make it easy and say that everyone whose names start with letters between A and K will get health care and L through Z are out of luck.

Yes, it’s arbitrary, but that’s how life is. A through K is a worthy group, including Don King, Henry Kissinger, the Kushners, the Kochs, Kellyanne Conway, Clint Eastwood and so forth. L through Z has Lenin, Stalin, Chuck Schumer, George Soros, Bernie Sanders, Edward Snowden, Sonia Sotomayor, Steven Spielberg, Bruce Springsteen, Taylor Swift, Mark Zuckerberg, that whole crowd. No need for a big bean-counter bureaucracy to divide the sheep from the goats: a computer can do it in 10 seconds. Beautiful.

Universal health care for “everybody” is a discredited socialist ideal, Mr. Red Cap, so put it out of your mind. This is not Sweden. Right? We’re not eating lingonberries and driving Volvos and singing “Halsa dem darhemma,” are we? No, we are not. This is America, land of opportunity, where liberty is the byword, not security.

When the enterprising Donner party headed for California in their covered wagons and got caught by a blizzard in the Sierras, they didn’t expect the government to send in helicopters, did they? No. They sized up the situation and did what needed to be done. The strong ate the weak. Ma and Pa cut Grandma and Grandpa’s throats in the night and butchered them and froze the meat and that lasted them for awhile, and then Buddy and Sis knocked off Ma and Pa and chewed on them until the snow melted and they could hike to safety. That’s how it’s done in America. Wake up, smell the coffee.

GARRISON KEILLOR, the creator and retired host of “A Prairie Home Companion,” writes for The Washington Post.

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